PUBLIC SPEAKING CAREER HUMILIATION: O’Day’s Travel Woes #44

May, 1995 (continued):

As you might recall from last week’s installment, Caracol Radio had brought me to Colombia to talk to its salespeople about commercial copywriting.

Finally it was time for my speech/seminar (a combination of both). Now, I speak a little bit of “street Spanish,” but certainly not enough to deliver an entire presentation in that language. One or two sentences at a time is the most I can handle.

I can, however, read Spanish quite convincingly. My accent and pronunciation are pretty good, and if you heard me reading Spanish and you didn’t know better, you’d think I understood what I was saying.

In other words, this is the first time I’d spoken in a country whose native language I could at least fake. (On the other hand, I cannot even attempt to read aloud a sentence in Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, German, etc., so in those countries I simply struggle to learn to say “thank you” convincingly.)

So I worked with a Spanish-fluent friend of mine to prepare two paragraphs with which to open my presentation. I deliberately did not tell my hosts that I had done this preparation; I wanted to surprise and delight them with my fluency.

I went over every phrase, every word. I rehearsed it again and again, paying special attention to certain words which I found difficult to pronounce.  I practiced my gestures, my pauses, my facial expressions.

By the time I mounted the stage to speak, I was ready.

In the very first sentence, I told the audience how excited I was to be enjoying my very first trip to Colombia.

The Spanish word for “trip” is viaje (vee-ah-hay). This was not one of the words I had had trouble pronouncing.

But in my nervousness, I said vieja (vee-ay-hah).

As you can see, these two words are identical.

Almost.

I mean, it’s the same five letters, with the “e” and the “a” transposed. All in all, a pretty tiny mistake.

Viaje means “visit.”

Vieja means “old woman.”

When I proudly and enthusiastically announced how excited I was to be enjoying my very first old woman in Colombia, 300 radio advertising people fell on the floor laughing.

Perhaps because of this humiliating blunder, my presentation seemed to take much, much longer than usual. Usually I am pretty good at estimating how much material I need to prepare for a given length of time, and I always prepare more material than I’ll have time for.

In this case, I knew my seven pages of notes would carry me through considerably more than the two hours I was scheduled to speak.

When I got to the end of Page 5, I figured I had 15-20 minutes left. I glanced at the little alarm clock I had placed unobtrusively on the lectern, and I was shocked: Only one hour had elapsed. An hour still to go and I had exhausted 70% of my prepared material.

How could this happen?

I slowed down. Way down. To a crawl.

After turning over Page 6, leaving me with just one more page of notes, I looked at the clock again. There still was one hour left.

I was very hot. (I told you it’s hot & humid there.) I was tired. I was embarrassed by my viaje/vieja debacle. And all I could do was stare at the clock and wonder, “How can this be? How can I have gone through an entire page of notes and still have an hour left?”

Then I realized: The clock had stopped.

I glanced at my watch. I had just five minutes left.

You know how relieved you are when you awaken from a nightmare and realize it was just a bad dream? That’s exactly how I felt.

Next Month: Getting frisked at Bogotá Airport…plus my train ride with skinheads in Germany.